The origins of many philanthropic endowments have roots in practices that caused deep suffering and have left a legacy of enduring harms. Today’s foundations, as the financial beneficiaries of their forebears’ past actions, have an obligation to repair these impacts. The importance of acknowledging how wealth has been accumulated and reimagining philanthropy through a reparatory lens as a result.
Derek Bardowell
CEO, Ten Years' Time
Laurence Meyer
Digital Freedom Fund
Vanessa Thomas
Director, Global Programs, Decolonizing Wealth Project
Kali Akuno
Cooperation Jackson
Luam Kidane
Thousand Currents
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‘With the advent of the Industrial Revolution we were led to believe that great white men came up with innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship to transform the country from a small trading nation to controlling the resources and a third of the world population by the 19th century. What we know now is that, due to the work of scholars such as Eric Williams, Walter Rodney and Hilary Beckles, the roots of the funding of the Industrial Revolution were based on the enslavement and colonisation of Black people and other minoritised communities. This created the wealth and power for a new breed of philanthropists where their legacy has shaped the development of current endowments and grant making today. These men used their philanthropy to hide their deeds of violence and exploitation and rebranded themselves as caring benevolent individuals with strong Christian virtues in helping the deserving poor and building monuments and a range of social infrastructure to demonstrate a new Enlightenment Britain.’
Patrick Vernon, Racial Justice & Social Transformation report, 2022
‘You’ve been able to lie about terms, so you’ve been able to call people like Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist when in fact he was a murderer, a rapist, a plunderer, and a thief. But you call Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist because, after he stole our diamonds and our gold, then he gave us some crumbs so we can go to school and become just like you. And that was called philanthropy’.
Stokely Carmichael, The Dialectics of Liberation, 18 July 1967